In a storage area network (SAN), a SAN management application monitors and manages manageable entities in the SAN. The manageable entities include storage arrays, connectivity devices, and hosts. Typically, software components known as agents execute on the hosts for gathering, reporting, and monitoring the manageable entities in the SAN. The manageable entities are responsive to the agents for reporting various status metrics back to the agents and receiving control information from the agents. A management server executes the SAN management application, and oversees the agents. The management server is responsive to a console having a graphical user interface (GUI) for receiving and displaying operator parameters with a SAN operator.
The agents periodically transmit management information to the management application. The management information pertains to the manageable entities that the agent is monitoring, and is employed to update and maintain a managed object database (MODB). The managed object database stores collective information on the manageable entities across the SAN for responding to queries from the management application. Such queries include available storage, used storage, configured and in-use devices, and frequency of usage, for example, and is employed to generate reports on trending analysis, current utilization, usage projections, and other reporting, accounting and maintenance operations.
In a large SAN, the management information transmitted from the agents can be substantial. For example, a storage array has many individual storage devices, such as disk drives, each having corresponding management information. In particular, information concerning a large storage array having many storage devices may be unwieldy and time-consuming to process. Typically, therefore, the management application processes the management information from the agents at off-peak hours, such as overnight.